chalkboard

When we wake in the morning, we turn to the other and whisper, "Another day." Mostly, what we mean is, "Hello." Mostly, what we mean is "How lucky." But sometimes, what we mean is, "There was nothing, before this." It's the good kind of pretending, to believe you've got a do-over, an empty plate, a chalkboard wiped spotless. Sometimes, it is better to fool yourself that whatever happened will never happen again. The disappointment, the mistake, the tantrum, the sorrow. Sometimes, you have to absolve yourself of what you remember or what you did or what you didn't do, let the past float behind you like the trail of a ship passing. This is for your own good. This is the brief suspension of belief you must allow yourself, the slip in the system, a benevolent black hole that will take you, blinking and history-less, into the next big universe and its unfathomable stars. "Another day," we murmur just after the alarm rings, before the day mutates into loads of laundry and other metaphors, before the disassembly begins in earnest. "Another day." It is a password between us. A secret handshake. It doesn't matter that the words will last only as long as it takes for them to pass through our mouths. It is enough. It is a forest nymph, a seahorse, a sand dollar, a fairytale, a sprinkling of pixie dust sealing our bodies into the sweetest innocence, our hearts forgetting they'd ever broken at all.